Voters see through robots and ring-ins

Not since he became leader of the Liberal Party has Tony Abbott looked and sounded more robotic than he did this week.

By any measure the growth and employment numbers were good news. They easily exceeded the forecasts of the most optimistic market economists.

Even applying all the qualifications that the most cautious analysts could come up with, the numbers told the story of an economy performing remarkably well.

Yet Abbott did not falter in his unswerving determination to concede nothing to Julia Gillard’s government.

His lines of attack against the government’s “incompetent economic management” did not vary by a single syllable.

His script sounded like rote politics, unchanging no matter what the circumstances.

For those on his side who worry that his negative attack strategy has become counter-productive, Abbott’s performance this week would have provided more reasons to be concerned.

But Abbott’s reluctance to adjust his message to changed circumstances is a problem that runs deeper than the politics of the week.

It goes to a much bigger issue, one which was lobbed into the national debate this week by the Lowy Institute’s 2012 survey of Australian attitudes.

Among the swag of interesting findings in the survey was some alarming evidence that Australians a fast losing faith in their democratic system. Only 60 per cent of respondents supported Australia’s democracy over other political systems, suggesting an alarming disconnection between the voters and the political process that serves them.

There is strong evidence that Australian voters have reacted negatively to the experience of minority federal government.

The hung Parliament and the razor’s edge on which the Gillard government operates have yielded a ferocity of political rhetoric that the public clearly does not like.

This is undoubtedly linked to the fact that for a lot of the voting age population, the picture they see when they look at politics is an ugly one.

You only have to look at the latest opinion polls to see a clear manifestation of this in the standing of the country’s most important political figures – the Prime Minister and the alternative prime minister.

But the huge collapse in Labor’s primary vote to record lows has not resulted in a stampede to the Coalition.

According to the Nielsen poll published in The Australian Financial Review, Labor’s primary vote has fallen 12 percentage points since the last election, yet the Coalition’s has risen by only 4.5 points. The remaining 7.5 points have simply been “parked” with minor parties and the don’t-knows.

The two-party-preferred vote overwhelmingly favours the Coalition, but this in spite of Abbott, not because of him.

Voters clearly want something other than what’s on offer, but the alternatives they would choose are being denied to them by the major parties. The public prefers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull to Gillard and Abbott, according to all the leadership polls. Yet both sit in Parliament twiddling their thumbs, virtually without influence.

Rudd is silent on Labor’s backbench. Turnbull is almost silent on the opposition’s frontbench. He has asked just one question in the current session of Parliament.

Rudd and Turnbull share a terrible political burden: Both are stuck where they are because both the parties they represent show the same bloody-minded determination to keep them there.

Labor arrogantly overturned the voters’ choice as prime minister in 2010 when its faceless powerbrokers recklessly replaced Rudd with Gillard. The ongoing voter resentment of that action is a powerful factor in Gillard’s failure.

The Liberals dumped Turnbull in a fit of pique over his climate change policy in 2009, expecting Joe Hockey would take his place, but finding themselves under Abbott’s leadership after Hockey was eliminated in the first round of voting.

Both decisions reflected deeper issues about the increasingly dysfunctional organisations into which the Labor and Liberal parties are evolving.

The Labor Party is becoming a crumbling ruin, its union-dominated structures frozen in time and incapable of reform. Gillard, the beneficiary of this, will not do anything to change it.

The Liberal Party long since ceased to be “liberal”. John Howard transformed it into a conservative party and now Abbott refuses to use his authority to back those such as Peter Reith who warn that the party is withering and dying. The so-called small-l Liberals for whom Turnbull might be a standard bearer have long-since given up their memberships.

Party politics in Australia is now deeply uninspiring. Few bother making the effort to get involved, a turn-off that will be reflected in poorer quality parliaments.

Australia is sleep-walking towards a long-term, systemic disaster.

If the old parties can’t see their own deaths approaching, then the time has surely come for someone brave to stand up and say we need a new party.

How brave is Malcolm Turnbull?

gkitney@fairfaxmedia.com.au

The Australian Financial Review

BY Geoff Kitney

Geoff is a senior national affairs writer and columnist in
our Canberra bureau.